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This view of the Weir Memorial Methodist Church is a "real photo" card -- a photographic print made from a negative, rather than an inked image on plain paper made from a printing plate. This building is gone, today, replaced by a structure built in 1962. Other things about the intersection of High and Walnut streets have changed since 1907, as well: the streets in this picture look like unpaved dirt, and there are no storm gutters. The crosswalks are stone or timber slabs. This is the first of four sets of cards published by C. U. Williams, of Bloomington, Ill., in this collection. Like many real-photo cards the captions and numbers are written directly on the negative using india ink, so that when the image is printed the lettering appears in white. The series:
(If you'd like to see more Indiana postcards, the Indiana Historical Society has scanned 787 of the cards in its Jay Small collection. The scans include seven Washington County cards.) It's intriguing to speculate on whether there's a direct correspondence between this series of real-photo cards by Williams' and the C. U. Williams Photoette series. The real-photo view of South Main Street in this series, number 1790, matches the printed view, number 364, in that series (and the same view appears in the Art Manufacturing series as number 719). But the view of the south-east corner of the square is a different photograph, taken at a different season of the year, than the printed view numbered 367. (There are other reappearances of Williams views: The photograph of the library in this series was also used for a card in the "Blue Sky" series and the C. U. Williams Brownette series -- both of which I've assigned to the 1910s, but I'm beginning to think belong in the 1900s as well.)
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Real-photo cards can often be dated by the design of their back, or particularly of the box for the stamp. There is a very useful Web page that dates the photographic paper stock used for real-photo cards by the